Joe Van Brussel, writer and philosopher, has been inside the largest publishers and media companies like the New York Times, the Washington Post, HuffPost, and Verizon. He writes a brilliant Substack that asks the question most companies skip: why are we using AI, and what happens to us if we don't think it through? 

Joe and Nadia get into where AI sits in the creative, content, and legacy media sectors. They unpack the realities of AI pre-burnout, the exhaustion that hits before anyone's even lost a job, and AI demoralization, the deeper loss of belief in developing skills AI might replace tomorrow. Both, Joe argues, come from companies handing people powerful tools with zero context. He also makes the case against outsourcing research to AI: skipping the messy, first-hand digging quietly strips the originality out of your thinking, and self-expression, not just output, is the human skill most at risk of atrophy.

They dig into legacy media, where some agencies are now getting client contracts that explicitly say no AI, at all - a sign of a growing market willing to pay for guaranteed human work. And on AGI, Joe offers a reality check: panic about an overnight "inflection point" ignores real constraints, compute, power, data centers, human demand. That will keep this rollout slower and messier than the headlines suggest.

It's a conversation about staying intentional in a moment that rewards speed over thought, and what Joe hopes to pass to his own daughter: not AI-proof skills, but the curiosity that makes learning worth it in the first place.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn

Follow Joe’s Substack.

LISTEN RECS:

Diary of a CEO episode with Daniel Kokotajilo "OpenAI Whistleblower Finally Speaks. AI has a 70% Chance of Going..."

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

Katie Langdon, Founder and Creative Director of Skin and Blister, a UK healthcare communications agency she co-founded with her sister Fiona, marking ten years in business this year, joins Nadia Koski to talk trust, expertise, and what generative AI is doing to healthcare communications.

Katie and Nadia dig into where trust actually breaks down when AI enters the picture: not when a human creative uses it, but upstream — in platforms built fast, without medical input or clinical guardrails. They also get into the fight over what expertise is worth when clients assume AI should mean lower rates. Katie's take: AI doesn't erase twenty years of experience, it just makes people forget to pay for it.

The conversation ranges into creative originality in an AI-saturated landscape, building a fully remote team years before it was trendy, and why the human element in health may be more irreplaceable than in almost any other industry. Katie closes with her three-year vision for Skin and Blister — one aimed at making healthcare conversations less taboo and more human, everywhere.

Connect with Katie on LinkedIn
Follow Skin & Blister on LinkedIn
Learn more about Skin and Blister Healthcare Communications

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

Sixty percent of the CEOs, MDs, and founders in the room didn't have a functioning AI strategy. Six months later, Judit Szekeres says the needle has barely moved. So what's actually holding businesses back and what do they need to do right now?

It isn't a lack of interest. It's overwhelm. Judit Szekeres is the Founder of Swell AI, an AI consultant and trainer who spent twenty years inside the agency world before stepping out to help businesses build real, human-first AI capability. Budapest-born and London-based, she brings a change manager's lens to a conversation that's usually all hype.

In this episode, Judit gets into why AI has no finish line and why letting go of perfection is step one, the layers most companies skip — business strategy, then data, then AI — and why "garbage in, garbage out" trips so many up. She makes the case for adopting AI together rather than alone, shares the cultural fault lines she sees between the US, Europe, and Asia, and opens up about the gender problem in both AI and agencies, and the Women in Agencies partnership she launched to help close it.

Her advice for the overwhelmed? Roll up your sleeves, start using it, get your guardrails in order, and remember… you can't break it.

Learn more about Judit's work: swell-ai.co.uk
Connect with Judit on LinkedIn: Judit Szekeres

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

The Still Human podcast is LIVE from Cannes Lions 2026! Host, Nadia Koski opens with a solo recap of a week packed with the top trends, creativity, events, and panels, including the "Women in AI" panel she co-produced with The Marketeer Group at HUMAN's The Haven — seventy seats, over four hundred people on the waitlist. From there, she hands the mic to four conversations recorded on the ground at Cannes, each built around one question: How are AI, GenAI, and new workflows actually changing the way people work?

You will hear from Laurie Keith, Senior Vice President of Emerging Media and Technology at the Ad Council, who breaks down how AEO and GEO are reshaping visibility for social-impact campaigns, and how her team together with Microsoft, built a closed-system conversational AI experience to help families talk about tough topics like youth firearm safety. Following, Lauren Woulard, PR and communications leader and founder of CultuHER, former entertainment comms executive, talks about rebuilding her own visibility and equity after a layoff, and why owning her narrative in an age when AI can replicate likeness, starts with real, unautomated human connection.

Next up, Paul Dahill, Managing Director EMEA at Koddi, takes the conversation into agentic commerce: what it means for brands when AI agents start shopping and making decisions on a consumer's behalf, and why most people still want a co-pilot rather than a full autopilot. And finally, Alaina Crystal, creative strategist and founder of Girl Hike, closes things out with an unconventional take on AI as a creative partner rather than a decision-maker, and why gut instinct and intuition only get more valuable as machines get better at prediction.

Four different corners of the industry, one throughline: the tools are moving fast, but the judgment, the taste, and the human part are still ours to own.

Connect with
Laurie Keith · Lauren Woulard · Paul Dahill · Alaina Crystal
The Marketeer Group - The Digital Marketeer Podcast

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

Carolina Barreiro doesn't do hype. She sends you the 80-page report and then calls you to unpack it for an hour.

As Global Director of Display and Rich Media at ShowHeroes Group — working across Europe, LATAM, and APAC from her base in Madrid — Carolina has a front-row seat to how AI is actually landing inside advertising and media. The picture she paints is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and a lot more honest.

Carolina and host, Nadia Koski, get into what the AI-productivity promise really looks like day-to-day. For Carolina, it's not glamorous. It's the first draft of a deck, the email she'd rewrite anyway, the meeting summary she couldn't face. It clears the runway. It doesn't do the actual thinking. And the real payoff isn't the minutes saved at work — it's the gym at lunch she now actually goes to, and the school pickup she's actually present for. But there's a catch she's noticed: if you haven't decided what the freed-up time is for, it doesn't turn into living. It turns back into work. The plate doesn't empty. It just moves faster.

They also get into where AI crosses a line. Carolina's take on emotional AI is one of the most precise and grounded in this conversation: using it as a mirror can genuinely help. Working out what you think, putting something into words at 2am when there's no one to call. The problem is when it stops being a mirror and becomes the relationship. When it quietly fills the spot of the friend, the therapist, or the conversation you've been putting off. She's careful not to point a single villain — responsibility sits across how these tools are built, how they're sold, and the fact that everyone is still learning. But she doesn't let anyone off the hook either.

On layoffs, Carolina cuts through the noise. A lot of what's being called AI transformation is actually a correction — companies that over-hired when money was cheap, baked in growth that never came, and now need a cleaner story. Klarna is the clearest case: 700 customer service roles replaced by AI, quality dropped, people rehired. On the record. Carolina's read: the further a job is from routine, repeatable work, the more "AI" is probably cover for something else. But she holds that loosely, because everyone is guessing in real time.

And for women who are mid-career right now? Drop the doom. Don't wait until you feel ready. Get hands on these tools badly, before feeling qualified. And lean into everything that doesn't automate — the judgment, the relationships, the read on a room. The skills many women were quietly taught to undervalue in themselves. As it turns out, those are the hardest things to replace. Stop waiting for permission.

Connect with Carolina Barreiro LinkedIn
Carolina's Substack

Pod episode, Diary of a CEO, with Steven Barlett and Karen Hao
"AI Whistleblower: We are Being Gaslit by the AI Companies"

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

Host Nadia Koski sits down with Jess Carlin, who is a consultant in the media and entertainment industry and co-creator of the Early Adoptr podcast — where she and Kyle break down AI and tech in a way that actually makes sense. No jargon gatekeeping. In this episode of Still Human, Nadia and Jess get into the trends that are flying under the radar — including Anthropic's study of 81,000 users that revealed AI's biggest value isn't just efficiency, it's scope expansion: giving people skills and capabilities they never thought they had. She also breaks down MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the universal connector that's quietly becoming the infrastructure of AI, allowing tools like Slack, Gemini Notes, chats, and Claude to finally play nicely together. 

Another deep dive during the conversation explores how AI is replacing jobs — but the full story is messier, and a lot more interesting. Yes, entry-level roles are disappearing. But Amazon had to pause vibe coding after it crashed their site and bring the junior engineers back to do QA. Klarna let go of their customer service team and quietly rehired. The cost of AI tokens is already on track to outpace the salaries of the people companies just let go. So what does that actually mean for the job market, for new grads, and for the next wave of leaders who were never hired to learn?

Jess and Nadia also get into the double standard that isn't going away. Research from LeanIn and Harvard Business School shows that women are 32% more likely than men to worry they'll be perceived as cheating when they use AI at work — and studies show that the exact same AI-assisted output is judged as less competent when it comes from a woman. They unpack why that's connected to imposter syndrome, mental load, and a systems gap — not a confidence gap. And then Jess gets into agents: what they actually are (one task, one agent), what agentic means (a string of agents working across a full workflow), what she built over a long weekend connecting Granola → Claude → Airtable to finally get her scattered workstreams into one to-do list — and why you do not need to start with OpenClaw.

___

SHOW NOTES

Connect with Jess Carlin LinkedIn

Follow the Early Adoptr Podcast LinkedIn · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Early Adoptr episode referenced: Stop Building AI Agents the Hard Way: Lessons from 25 Years in AI (w/Rob Webster)

Subscribe to Jess's newsletter So this happened… by Atonik

Try Granola (Jess's affiliate link) granola.ai

Articles & Research
Anthropic: What 81,000 users reveal about how people actually use AI
HBR: The Hidden Penalty of Using AI at Work Harvard Business School: Women Are Avoiding Using Artificial Intelligence. Can That Hurt Their Careers?
Sifted: Why women aren't 'missing' the AI train LeanIn.org: AI Women Gender Gap Data

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

What happens when a woman with two decades of experience, a shipped agentic AI product, and a proven proof of concept walks into a funding room — and watches a man with a napkin idea walk out with the check? She builds the room herself.

Preeti Tanwar is the Founder & CEO of HiEd Success, an agentic AI and data analytics firm helping universities transform student outcomes — and the Founder of ElevateHER AI, a nonprofit creating the ecosystem, visibility, and community that women in AI have been missing.

In this conversation, Preeti gets into the funding gap no one wants to talk about, why collaboration is the actual competitive edge (not a soft skill), how she built her first summit in two months with zero marketing dollars and filled the room with 131 leaders, and why she's telling every woman who's built something with AI to stop waiting and start bragging.

AI is the equalizer, she says. But only if you're in the room.


LINKS

ElevateHER AI Summit
Friday, May 29, 2025 · Johns Creek, Georgia
Register & learn more: elevatehernetwork.org | Elevate Her AI

Connect with Preeti Tanwar on LinkedIn

[email protected]
hiedsuccess.com
preetitanwar.info 

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

Seven conversations. Two days. One question running through all of them: What does it actually take to stay human while the world rewrites itself around you?

Recorded live at the OMR Festival in Hamburg, Germany, this first episode of Still Human brings together seven leaders at the sharp end of the AI conversation. Stefanie Tannrath, CEO of Universal McCann Germany, on why our entire frame around AI is too small. Yulia Kalner, Head of Media & Creative at Kantar Germany, on the hard data showing AI makes brands more efficient — but not more effective. Sabine Mayer, Chief Learning Officer at treibhaus, Marketing & Learning Lead at Take-Aw.ai, on the skill nobody's teaching yet: the one that sits somewhere between resilience and reflection. Christina Sontheim-Leven, CEO of 3e, executive mentor, and co-author of "Machtgebiete", on what genuine creativity actually is — and why AI is still just remixing what already exists.

Also in this episode: Marija Lux, Director of Customer Success Central EMEA at Integral Ad Science, on why prompting an LLM is nothing like a Google search — and what happens when teams share their AI experiments across departments. Rosa Markarian, independent consultant for AdTech, AI, and sustainable tech, on the market knowledge, relationships, and intercultural fluency that no model can localize — and on the energy cost of AI that nobody wants to put on the agenda. And Michael Mörs, Founder and CEO of SMA Development, who has been building AI into real products since 2017, on why you should never trust the output too much — and why the current wave of "AI-driven" layoffs is better storytelling than causal fact.

Thank you to MMA DACH for their support and partnership on this episode.

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi

AI is being called the great equalizer. It isn't. Men are 22% more likely than women to use AI daily at work. Women's jobs are 3x more likely to be automated. And only 31% of AI professionals are women. If we're not in the rooms where this tech gets built, priced, and regulated — we get left behind.

Still Human: Real Talk in the Age of AI is where host Nadia Koski — a global leader in marketing, communications, and digital transformation — gets into the nitty gritty. Real conversations with the people building, using, and questioning AI. No sugar coating. Just the how and the why behind what's being built.

Going behind the scenes with leaders in science, business, the arts, sports, media, tech, and non-profits — to break the biases, build with AI now, and figure out the habits, online and offline, it takes to make something extraordinary. Launching May 19th, wherever you get your podcasts. Follow now so you don't miss episode one. Real talk. Real people. Still human.

Still Human is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes out every two weeks. Please follow, subscribe and leave a review if this one landed.

Sound engineer: Morgan Bosc
Cover art: Adam Richarson
Nadia Headshot: Alessandro Fibbi